I think it was Chill who recently said something like, "The thing that Drum does best is compile 20 years of data and fact-check the hyperventilaters." I think that's right, and this is an excellent example of that: Top 20 charts of 2023.

That said, 20 charts means a lot of choices about what's the right way to frame the data, so I'm not saying that all of these are perfect. But overall, it's a really useful corrective to media narratives, and I wish it were standard journalism.

(FWIW, I think Drum is at his worst when he stumbles onto a superficial paradox of human behavior, and dismisses the obvious explanation, and it comes across as a desire to be perplexed instead of a desire to understand.)

Do you all want to talk about Claudine Gay?

My back-up topic is Britney Spears. We listened to her memoir on the drive to Florida. She comes off very sympathetic, and there are some tells that she was heavily involved in the writing process (like a slightly incoherent timeline at times and a tendency to skimp on some of the interesting parts, like how she ended the conservatorship. And a funny tendency to say woman when most people would say adult, like talking about the emotional maturation process.)

An unexpected thing that I like a lot about her: she comes off as not particularly ego-driven. She seems mostly indifferent to which albums have giant sales and which ones don't. She just loves rehearsing and being a workhorse (outside of the conservatorship, which is truly appalling.) Her parents are hideous. (Although she mostly paints her mom well during her childhood. But later on, yeesh.)

But yes, also Claudine Gay.

Mossy Character sends along this link, about the number of politicians in the US who are descendants of slave-owners.

While going through it, I'm struck by how rarely this perspective is considered. In discourse around race, you get constantly reminded of the aftermath of slavery on the black community, but the aftermath of the slave-owning side usually has this southern redneck Dukes of Hazzard vibe, as opposed to the residual wealth and power that gets passed down from generation to generation.

Ancestral ties to slaveholders have been documented previously for a handful of leaders, including Biden, Obama and McConnell. Scholars and journalists have also extensively examined slavery and its legacy, including how the North profited from the institution, and the role slavery played in decisions of past political leaders during the formation of America and after emancipation.

The Reuters examination is different. It focuses on the most powerful U.S. officeholders of today, many of whom have staked key positions on policies related to race. It reveals for the first time, in breadth and in detail, the extent of those leaders' ancestral connections to what's commonly called America's "original sin." And it explores what it may mean for them to learn - in personal, specific and sometimes graphic ways - the facts behind their own kin's part in slavery.

It is a very deep dive.

NickS writes: I just saw this (decade-old) report about middle schools compared to K-8. My initial reaction was skepticism; the idea of middle school makes a lot of sense. But, I remembered, my own feeling of connection to school and motivation bottomed out in middle school, and maybe there is room for improvement. I always just took that experience as part of my own process of adjusting to the world, but maybe a different model would work better?

Not all students are so fortunate, as West discovered last spring when he released a study that explored the achievement and dropout rates of students enrolled in grades three through 10 in Florida's public schools. The findings? In sum, students who left elementary schools for middle schools in grades six or seven "lose ground in both reading and math compared to their peers who attend K-8 schools," he wrote in "The Middle School Plunge," published in the spring 2012 issue of Education Next. Additionally, Florida students who entered middle school in sixth grade were 1.4 percentage points more likely than their K-8 peers to drop out of high school by 10th grade -- a whopping increase of 18 percent.

"Intuitively, I had not expected this to be an important policy lever, but there are a lot of indicators that things are not going well for students in the middle school grades in the United States," says West, who serves as executive editor of Education Next. "If you look at international comparisons, kids in the United States perform better at elementary school than the later grades ... so it made sense to look at whether grade configuration influenced this."

West decided to take a closer look after he read a 2010 study out of New York City by two Columbia University researchers that "produced compelling evidence that the transitions to middle schools were harmful for students in that setting." That research found that students entering grades six through eight or seven to eight schools experience a "sharp drop" in achievement versus those attending K-8 schools. West wondered whether the same patterns would be evident elsewhere and, if so, whether the drop in achievement was temporary or persisted into high school.

More recent article, says there hasn't been any definitive research findings.

Arguments over how to create the best learning environment for young adolescents go back decades. One pair of researchers called it "the longest-running debate in middle level educational research" -- and that was nearly thirty years ago.

Heebie's take: This is something that Jammies and I constantly talk about. He teaches the 9th and 10th graders who are most demoralized by the past few years, who seem far less equipped to handle school than any 3rd-5th grader.

This pretty much sums up my point of view:

Affirming Rogers' earlier point, the Globe article noted, "Middle schools were conceived in the 1970s and '80s as a nurturing bridge from early elementary grades to high school, but critics say they now more often resemble a swamp, where urban youth sink into educational failure."

So I'm finding this K-8 proposal very appealing.

That said, it's hard to imagine that the solution is as simple as converting to k-8. What my pedagogy friends say is basically that every intervention works on the small scale, and none of them scale up. Everything works if your teachers buy in to the premise, and you get teacher buy in with time-consuming relationship-building and trust. And nothing works without that.

My sincere belief: fix the poverty, and then you can tinker with the schools. But schools can't cure poverty. (But this K-8 thing is still appealing to me.)

Ile writes: This feels like something the Mineshaft should discuss. (gifted link)

Heebie's take: It's an article about how the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin got fired after posting a bunch of sex videos online. It sounds like there was nothing remotely problematic about the videos - they were the dorky happy postings of a married couple - but they were also totally sex videos.

The couple also has made a series of videos in which they cook meals with porn actors and then have sex.

"We have that show, 'Sexy Healthy Cooking,' where we interview performers and really humanize them in ways that you wouldn't get in their other work," Mr. Gow said. "It's an interesting process, and the people that we work with are completely professional, and very great to work with."

IKIHMTHB, but I remember reading a comparison of cooking shows and porn: both are trying to make a viewer feel like they're part of an experience that generally works best when you're there in person. So there's lots of running commentary on the sensory input - texture, taste, smells - that doesn't translate across a screen, and lots of exaggerated responses to sensory input, to help your imagination get into the groove.

Anyway, back to the Chancellor of Porn: it sounds like he did nothing ethically wrong but he probably squicked out a bunch of old stodgy donors with money, and so he had to go.

A few points:
1. You see a lot of hand-wringing over the commodification of education, where the students are the consumers and calling all the shots, but you could make a solid case that the commodification happens because the donors are the consumers, and they're the ones with outsized influence on public institutions.

2. There's a comparison to be made with the Moms For Liberty sex scandal meltdown, which has some similar basic facts - there's nothing problematic about consensual threesomes, per se. But in that case, (1) there's a rape allegation, distinct from the threesomes, and (2) the staggering hypocrisy of going after trans kids while not conforming to your own professed little rigid gender stereotypes. Every accusation is always, always, a confession.